readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The actor portraying Mark Zuckerberg & the NFL’s most cryptic quarterback

The twin towers still stand because we saw them, moved in and out of their long shadows, were lucky enough to know them for a time. They are a part of the city we carry around. It is hard to imagine that something will take their place, but at this very moment the people with the right credentials are considering how to fill the crater.

themarginalian.org

The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy

It is heartbreaking enough that we do lose everything that exists, everything and everyone we love, until we lose life itself — for we are a function of a universe in which it cannot be otherwise. But it is our singular human-made heartbreak that we often cope with our terror of loss — that deepest awareness of our own mortality — by losing sight of just how precious we are to each other, squandering in less-than-love the chance-miracle of our time alive together, only to recover our vision when entropy has taken its toll, when it is too late.

themarginalian.org

A Lei for Your Losses: Joan Didion on the Art of Letting Go

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead… Let go of them in the water.

themarginalian.org

Frankenstein Author Mary Shelley on the Surest Remedy for a Sunken Spirit and What Makes Life Worth Living

To live, according to this sense of the word, we must not only observe and learn, we must also feel; we must not be mere spectators of action, we must act; we must not describe, but be subjects of description. Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms… sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days… Who that knows what "life" is, would pine for this feverish species of existence?

themarginalian.org

The Loveliness of Letting Go: An Illustrated Ode to Life’s Lasts

The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last cup at your favorite coffee shop before it vanished overnight, the last living note of your mother's voice. Bittersweet or downright devastating, lasts are the currency of loss with which we pay the price for loving.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with James McBride

We spend enormous amounts of time listening to people tell us how to get rich, get fit, build companies, and improve our lives. Far fewer people listen to those who have actually lived one. Some of the most valuable lessons I've learned have come from conversations with people in their eighties and nineties.

themarginalian.org

How Love Comes to You

To give up on anything — a dream, a loved one, love itself — is to deny this most irrepressible pulse-beat of being alive.

themarginalian.org

How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo

Six ginkgos were among the handful of organisms that survived the bombing of Hiroshima. Long after Hitler and Oppenheimer have been pressed between the pages of history, the ginkgos are still alive, rising from the ruins of our capacity for destruction by hate as an emblem of our capacity for salvation by love. Salvation, be it of a species or of a soul, is always anchored in some act of love, and every act of love is at bottom an act of salvation.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The billionaire betting it all on the AI boom & the mom who vanished without a trace

Most of us are forgetting that from the beginning of our life, we are approaching death.

themarginalian.org

The Only Three Distinctions Between People

Instead of rich and poor, high and low, they are to be classed, — First, by their sorrows: for instance, whenever there are any, whether in fair mansion or hovel, who are mourning the loss of relations and friends, and who wear black, whether the cloth be coarse or superfine, they are to make one class. Secondly, all who have the same maladies, whether they lie under damask canopies or on straw pallets or in the wards of hospitals, they are to form one class. Thirdly, all who are guilty of the same sins, whether the world knows them or not; whether they languish in prison, looking forward to the gallows, or walk honored among men, they also form a class.

themarginalian.org

How to Live and How to Die

I close my eyes, savor a wafer of sacred cake on my tongue and try to taste my mother, to discern the message she baked in these loaves when she was too ill to eat them: I love you. It will end. Leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.

themarginalian.org

Death and How to Be More Alive: Carl Jung on Immortality and the Rebirth of Middle Age

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life's fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die.

themarginalian.org

How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived — who could say now with what passion? — since she had loved him for himself…

wired.com

Meta’s New Feel-Good AI Ad Uses a Song About the World Ending

The clip features the David Bowie track "Five Years," which includes lyrics such as "Earth was really dying (dying)."

longreads.com

A Dying Art

With its disappearance, we stand to lose a whole way of memorializing our dead: one that might be pricey, unnecessary, and even a little absurd, but only out of commitment to the notion that an occasion as final as death is worthy of pomp and circumstance.

themarginalian.org

Borges on How to Conquer Time

The vociferous catastrophes of a general order — fires, wars, epidemics — are one single pain, illusorily multiplied in many mirrors.

themarginalian.org

The Wild Iris: Nobel Laureate Louise Glück on the Door at the End of Your Suffering

It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth. Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little.

themarginalian.org

How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life

I am not saying this just to offer comfort to those who have lost someone, as if to say that in time everything will be all right, because even though it will be, it won't be. Rather, I am acknowledging that although this day marks the 11th anniversary of the worst day of our lives, it is also a beautiful day, with the sun shining, a child playing, a man enjoying a cigarette, a world quietly waking and moving forward.

themarginalian.org

Do Not Spare Yourself

To try to save ourselves from the despair by which we contour hope, to spare ourselves the fertile doubt and the gasps of self-surprise by which we discover who we really are, is to live a safe distance from alive.

themarginalian.org

Love After Life: Nobel-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman’s Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife

Fearful of contagion, Richard did not kiss her on the lips. After the ceremony he helped her slowly down the stairs, and onward they drove to Arline's new home, a charity hospital in Browns Mills, New Jersey.

themarginalian.org

Hermann Hesse on Solitude, the Value of Hardship, the Courage to Be Yourself, and How to Find Your Destiny

When destiny comes to a man from outside, it lays him low, just as an arrow lays a deer low. When destiny comes to a man from within, from his innermost being, it makes him strong, it makes him into a god… All sorrow, poison, and death are alien, imposed destiny. But every true act, everything that is good and joyful and fruitful on earth, is lived destiny, destiny that has become self.

notboring.co

America's Next 250

Two hundred and fifty years seems like a long time, but it's just three peoples' lifetimes at current averages. It would have been six lifetimes back then, except the average American's life expectancy has doubled over the past 250 years.